


Midwich

by Slyboots



Series: The Red Book [1]
Category: Silent Hill
Genre: 1940s, Ableism, Animal Abuse, Bechdel Test Pass, Bullying, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Catholic Character, Child Abuse, Corporal Punishment, Disabled Character, Elementary School, Gen, Horror, Religious Fanaticism, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, creepy children
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-22
Updated: 2014-01-22
Packaged: 2018-01-09 14:55:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1147321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Slyboots/pseuds/Slyboots
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"'Hurt,' said Mrs. Gordon, 'starts in the cradle. For all I know, it goes right on up to the grave.'"</p><p>In a town starved of new blood, K. Gordon sees the same pinched faces in her first-grade classroom again and again. Fanaticism and insularity start young in Silent Hill--and heaven help the outcast, for Mrs. Gordon can't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Midwich

**Author's Note:**

> Dedicated to the lovely BlueVelvetStars, who inspired me to dust off this ‘verse, the wickedly brilliant HappyLeech, who cajoled (and threatened) me into finishing something for once, and the Bruegger’s Bagels employees who politely ignored me and my laptop. Y’all have my undying gratitude (and patronage).

1.

Seven students. Four girls. Three boys—when the sun bronzed Mount Janus and spilled from flat tin roofs, and the mud melted into a thick slurry impassable by tractor wheels, there were only two.  
“We start ‘em young here,” Japheth Stone had said, rubbing his puckered stump, “I suppose. But you’d understand if—” And he’d spread his arms. She’d looked, and seen—  
Narrow strips of greasy farmland butting up against walls of forest. The dull rawhide faces of the very young and very old alike. The screeching clang of the rural accent.  
It was the accent that grated most.  
“If I’d grown up here,” Miss Gordon had said on that first day. “Well, yes. I suppose I would.”  
And—in turn, perhaps—he’d shuddered at her teachers’-college elocutions. Politely he’d averted his eyes. As if she’d learn in time.

  
2.  
Seven students. The first-grade classrooms at Midwich Elementary had been built for twenty or more, and six boys and girls crowded like misaligned teeth into the first and second rows. Jostling. Craning their necks.  
The seventh stood by her desk, hands on his knees, his dusty-blond hair slipping over his brow.  
Miss Gordon took the paddle from the wall.  
A whistle went up among the students, and Miss Gordon winced. “Now, James—”  
“Jimmy,” said the boy, in that intolerable drawl. “Get it right.”  
Pale faces bobbed. James had a roomful of allies.  
Miss Gordon massaged the paddle’s oily oak, checking for splinters. There were no splinters. “Well, Jimmy, can you tell me what you did wrong? Why I’m doing this?”  
A sour ray of sunlight peeked through the window. James’s eyes flashed.  
“Because that Kraut sold me.”  
It was a dockworker’s voice pitched high and fluting. Involuntarily Miss Gordon’s fingers tightened on the handle.  
The Wolf boy.  
Leo Wolf was no more German than James Stone was English, of course. He slurred and Ayuhed and saluted the flag with the best of them, all with an air of prickly self-protection. Yet in wartime, in dark corners of the earth where a bad wind could knock out Roosevelt’s radio dispatches, Miss Gordon sensed, this was so much drafty literalism. It meant not a thing to James that his classmate had been born in Silent Hill and that he was liable to die there. Perhaps that idea was beyond a dull-eyed boy with two missing teeth. Perhaps James was incapable of caring.  
 _Two weeks,_ thought Miss Gordon, with a stabbing shiver, _and he’s made me as cynical as Lucifer._  
She straightened up, turning to the classroom. “Who can tell me what James did wrong?”  
James’s lip curled. Around his missing tooth his gum looked bruised. “It was that God-hating Nazi ass! You all saw him! He told on me!”  
“Bend over, James,” said Miss Gordon. “Lower your pants.”  
“Drawers, too,” said a girl in the front row. Her greasy brown hair sparkled in the autumn sunrise.  
“Drawers, too,” said Miss Gordon.  
James pinked, eyes widening. “Christ-lover! God-sucker!”  
The paddle whooshed down. In the front corner, untouched by the sun, a milky-pale and Teutonic boy watched James’s every shudder. He did not smile.  
In two weeks, Miss Gordon had never seen him smile.  
“He’s not sorry,” observed the girl, and the other three girls murmured: no, James was not sorry. Perhaps he’d never been taught how. “Make him really sorry, Miss.”  
And to the best of her ability, as the sun ate through the dirty windowpanes, Miss Gordon did.

3.  
If you taught for long enough in a single town, where blood mingled with blood and the children grew up as stunted as the sorry crops whose rows they dug, you would—horribly, inevitably—learn to see patterns.  
There were 14 students in the class of 1975. By then Mrs. Gordon allowed them to arrange their own desks.  
By September, 13 desks lined the walls of Mrs. Gordon’s first-grade classroom.  
Dahlia Gillespie’s daughter sat, lonely as a painted saint, in the middle. Every morning the sun caught her cuts and scrapes and, glistening, made them sing.  
 _Dahlia is abusing her,_ thought Mrs. Gordon some mornings, in the argot of 1975, and then: _But she doesn’t fight back. She never fights back, that’s obvious._  
The nasty parts of her took hold then, and whispered as Mrs. Gordon took attendance, She hasn’t got Dahlia’s spunk.  
 _She’s seven, for Christ’s sake,_ said Mrs. Gordon into her head, and in the mental silence she missed Jack Finney’s piping “Here.”  
 _She lets them carve up her desk,_ persisted Miss Gordon, as the sun rose and the shadows warped around Alessa. _She lets them call her “thief,” and you know she’s sure-as-pigs-is-pigs never stolen a thing in her life. She wouldn’t have the heart._  
And that was when Mrs. Gordon turned away.  
Dahlia never came to collect Alessa in the afternoons. “Mommy’s busy minding the store,” Alessa said once in that flat grown-woman voice. “She doesn’t have time for kid stuff.”  
“Yes,” said Mrs. Gordon, and to her own surprise she pulled a dusty Hershey’s bar from her purse, peeling back the foil. “But—”  
“There aren’t any buts, Mrs. Gordon.” Mechanically Alessa ate. The chocolate bulged in her skinny throat. “Thank you.”  
“I think your mother should—”  
“She _can’t_ ,” said Alessa, and she turned on her heel and kicked up sawdust.  
 _Dahlia can’t expect a little girl home right at three,_ thought Mrs. Gordon, watching blue uniforms parade down the walk. _Especially if she can’t be bothered—_  
It was not until days later that Mrs. Gordon realized, as Alessa watched (hands folded neatly in her pockets, like a doll’s) the other children flood the hall, that it was not _Dahlia_ Alessa Gillespie feared.

4.  
If you taught for long enough, and you were alert and clever and not too kind, you would learn something about children.  
Every class had its goat. The lucky ones the teachers never saw, and so they were never helped, never singled out. Sometimes they dropped out; more often they suffered patiently, saying not a word. _This_ , Mrs. Gordon thought whenever she supervised lunch, as she watched the children drift into their wide incomprehensible orbits, _is where saints are made._  
She saw them alone; she watched the hatred planted in their eyes, watched it bloom and swell and ripen; and she never interfered.  
Even so, when Alessa made her friend, Mrs. Gordon almost missed it. She was grading spelling papers that clear cold September afternoon, sounding out every error. The town’s yowling accents flowed from her tongue.  
 _Something in the language?_ she wondered. _Something like the Pennsylvania Dutch or the Gullah, something about the isolation making good old English harder to learn—_  
For several instants she put down the paper, turning to the window. In the shadow of the clock tower, children drifted to and fro through the courtyard, aimless. Planets without a sun.  
Mrs. Gordon turned back.  
The two girls in the corner of the classroom, sitting Indian-style behind a forest of desks, did not look up. The shadows rubbed out their faces.  
Mrs. Gordon caught a flash of limp white hair, of skin the yellow-white of spoiled milk, and closed her eyes. Counted years. Nineteen-seventy-five, nineteen-seventy-four—  
—and then all the way back to 1944, and to a crippled German (German-American, one said nowadays) boy, two years older than his classmates, who just might have been—  
—who had, Mrs. Gordon would confirm later, paging through yellowing class photographs, certainly been an albino.  
Her name was Claudia Wolf; she was five, the undisputed goat of Mr. Moore’s kindergarten class; bruises glowed beneath her skin; and she was Alessa Gillespie’s very first friend.  
Mrs. Gordon left them alone, for the most part. There was no sense encouraging the bullies.  
But from then on, as the children flooded out to recess, she left her classroom door open.

5.  
The same September sun hung over the courtyard, spilling down rows of misaligned cobblestones and knots of children picking at wartime lunches, as Miss Gordon told Leo that he’d better stay inside that day.  
He nodded, yet moved to rise. His cane rattled on the varnished floorboards.  
“Leo,” said Miss Gordon, “I’m talking to you.”  
“Yes, ma’am.”  
Concentration broken, Leo sagged back into his seat. Sawdust clung to the hem of his slacks.  
“Now,” she began, “this isn’t because of anything you did.”  
She’d found the raven herself.  
She’d been walking to class that morning, alone in her thoughts, as the first sun reddened the entrance hall’s cobblestones. The shadow had formed beneath her feet. Little hands had broken its wings, snap-snap, at neat right angles to its flattened body; it hung from the window-leading, nailed just beneath the bone with an adult’s precision. _Crucified_ , she’d thought, as the sun warmed its feathers.  
The tree branch—  
—James must have waited, she’d realized, until even the teachers had gone, until he was alone with the low rumble of the school boilers—  
—the tree branch James had climbed swayed, stripped of leaves, against the schoolhouse walls.  
Leo was watching her, shielding his eyes as the sun climbed the wall. Miss Gordon blinked herself back to reality.  
“Is that all?” said Leo, fingering his cane with his free hand. “May I go now, ma’am?”  
“And it’s not because you’re a cripple, either,” she said, with perhaps too much magnanimity. “You know, God love you, I’m not about to let a little thing like—”  
“Yes, ma’am,” he whispered.  
“It’s about James.”  
“Jimmy’s a coward,” said Leo, looking away. “Am I supposed to be frightened, ma’am?”  
She almost smiled: anger. So there was something human in the Wolf boy after all.  
Two years older than the rest, and thin as a consumptive—the rumor was that he’d had _polio_ —  
“Am I?”  
“Well,” she said, and the glassy voices of distant children filled the gap, “I’m going to call Mr. and Mrs. Stone, and I’m going to have a little talk with them. And in the meantime, I think you should just—”  
“Is that,” said Leo, “the Christian thing to do?”  
“Be polite, Leo,” said Miss Gordon. “Now, I’ve got a few books in here for you—I took the liberty of getting the big-print ones, just for—”  
His eyes danced over the cross hanging high on the wall, pooled in a faint halo of sunlight. “I can read. I’m not _blind_. I want to be out there with them.”  
“If only,” said Miss Gordon, and there she left him.

6.  
“She isn’t misbehaving, is she?”  
The Indian summer was trickling away when she filched the number, and gone entirely by the time she worked up the nerve to call it. September cold bled from the darkened hallway into the classroom.  
“No,” said Mrs. Gordon, watching through fogged windows as the floor below went dark. “No, I wouldn’t say that, Mr. Wolf.”  
Leonard bristled. In the intervening years he’d soured, his thin face growing offensively ugly. No, she couldn’t see Claudia in him—  
Yet when he spoke, it seemed impossible that she could have missed it.  
“I don’t appreciate being called out here, ma’am, for no purpose. There’s work needs doing. I’m a single father, as you ought to know, and without me to look after—”  
Mrs. Gordon silenced him, raising her hand. She still had that power, at least.  
Dust clung to the too-sharp lines of his suit. He was poor. She smelled it on him.  
“Leonard,” she said, “You ought to know I’m a mandatory reporter.”  
“Eh?” he sneered.  
“Claudia is suffering,” she said, testing her calm. It held. “She’s all alone. Her only friend is Al—”  
She broke off. Perhaps she’d said too much.  
Leonard cocked his head. “Then her teacher ought to have called me, shouldn’t he? What’s he done? Passed responsibility on to you, has he?”  
“It’s important,” said Mrs. Gordon softly, “for children to belong.”  
He took off his dark glasses, rubbing them on his shirtsleeve. The skin around his eyes had collapsed, its creases limp and rotten-looking. At forty (surely no more than that?) Leonard Wolf was an old man.  
She squinted for the boy, and from glazed eyes and slack pupils, the church— _their_ Church—stared back.  
“And she _does_ belong,” he rasped, producing a cigarette. Beneath the nicotine stains on his nails gleamed white flecks of malnutrition. “There are no outcasts among the elect of God, ma’am. Not a one.”  
He laughed, a choked bark. She had never heard him laugh before.  
Her own familiar laugh was a witch’s cackle, high and crazed with defeat, as she joined in.

7.  
The battle lines were forming again.  
“They’re going at it, ma’am,” said Leo with a taut smile. “Someone’s getting thumped out there.”  
And so they were, a circle of five. Four girls. One boy. In the center— _the cooking pot_ , thought Miss Gordon, and swallowed it down—stood Calvin White, stocky and strong, gazing at James Stone with the mild dead eyes of a slaughtered ox.  
Dahlia, greasy hair falling from its spit-curls, pointed dead center at White’s chest. Her lips twisted wide.  
 _She’s defending him,_ thought Miss Gordon, who knew the ways of girls. _So she’s human enough, at least. So they aren’t all little jackals._

8.  
Mrs. Gordon, when she remembered that moment (and she often did, under flat skies and empty suns), thought, _She probably started it._

9.  
“You stay here,” said Miss Gordon, rising from her desk. At the doorway she turned, glancing up at the cross hanging crude-carved on the wall, and genuflected.  
The school’s phone was downstairs, tucked behind the receptionist’s desk, and Miss Sagan looked askance at Miss Gordon as she elbowed her way in.  
“Ain’t it—”  
It was a mark of Miss Gordon’s fear that she did not wince.  
“It’s Stone. He’s—”  
Miss Sagan nodded and made the call.  
Neither of them noticed—not immediately enough to matter—the pale boy limping round the corner.

10.  
The cries of “Witch” had almost died away, and the children scattered—as if there were anywhere to go—when Mrs. Gordon reached Alessa. She knelt, shaking, on the green, folding and unfolding her hands in uneasy prayer.  
At first glance new bruises faded into old.  
Claudia, her hand tiny on Alessa’s shoulder, glanced up. “They hurt her, teacher. They hurt her really badly.”  
The tears caught the icy light, shining with the red rage around her eyes.  
“Alessa, sweetie.” Mrs. Gordon dropped to one knee. Instantly the cold soaked, muddy and thick, through the knee of her slacks. “Who was it? What did they do to you?”  
Mud and blood trickled together in the hollow of Alessa’s eye. “Claudia, you should’ve gone when I said. You shouldn’t have stayed.”  
“I’m used to it,” said Claudia, with a proud little shrug. “And they called her bad names, teacher. Not just mean ones. _Bad_ ones.”  
“It’s not fair,” said Alessa, spitting. A tangle of blood and tears splattered the grass. “Claudia wasn’t even hurting them.”  
Mrs. Gordon blinked twice. Said formless prayers. Asked the question she dared not ask. “Were you?”  
Alessa set her jaw. Claudia shook her head, mulish in her innocence.  
Their shadows wobbled across the lawn as Mrs. Gordon led them inside.  
“Claudia,” she said as the school nurse’s door shut with a puff of sour air, “I think that maybe it’s time for you to find some new friends.” 

11.  
On Monday Alessa Gillespie did not come to school. The sun crept, free and clear, across her desk. The spot where her schoolbooks would have been was steamy-warm by the end of the day—  
—and Mrs. Gordon pressed her hand to it, wondering.

12.  
 _They’re scourging him._  
She flung the door wide, and one or two Norman Rockwell little girls looked up. “Stop,” she yelled, in a weak voice with ragged edges, and perhaps one or two of them did. “For God’s sake, stop.”  
 _It’s the Scourging at the Pillar,_ continued that calm voice, that educated Douay-Rheims voice. _They can’t know the first thing about it—they’re pagans, every last barbaric little one of them, I’d bet anything—and yet they’ve got it cold. To the last detail._  
The circle had broken, reformed, herding Calvin White against the clock tower. Sticks still heavy with leaves whoosh-whooshed down, twirling in childish hands.  
 _Pity they couldn’t get some sheep bone,_ said that unhurried part of her, and Miss Gordon strode across the sultry afternoon lawn with a holy ringing in her ears. There was all the time in the world.  
“Christ-lover,” bellowed James Stone, and his branch cracked whip-speed as he flicked his wrist. “You shitty saint-eater. You stupid streak of piss, you like that?”  
“Saint-eater,” echoed one of the slower girls. “You’re gonna kill him, Jimmy!”  
“Sure I am,” said James. “Sure.”  
Calvin raised his head, bruises pooling behind his eyes. “You never.”  
 _Seven_ , she thought, as her voice cried, “stop.” _Seven_.  
James’s branch shattered in a shower of twigs. Calvin jumped sideways, with a groan that bored into Miss Gordon. “Drop it, Jimmy. Come on, stupid. Stop. It’s not funny anymore, Jimmy, it’s _not_ , stop—”  
“Who said it’s funny, Cal?” said Dahlia, with the smile Miss Gordon had always imagined on angels.  
“We’re gonna kill you, Christ-lover,” said James, and he snatched up a branch thicker than his wrist. “We’re gonna beat your little guts out.”  
There was all the time in the world. She should have run; she should have screamed; but she walked straight-backed and calm, thinking _Seven_ in that same golly-gosh voice, and she very nearly reached them.  
The light changed. An acrid halo spilled across the lawn, scattering them.  
“Hi, Lenny,” said Dahlia. “You’re late.”  
In the river of artificial light streaming from the open door, Leo Wolf limped across the grass. His cane sank with soft pops into the mud; yet in his hopping gait, Miss Gordon thought, there was the dignity of a saint.  
Beneath his arm was Room 204’s battered cross.  
“Look at this Nazi-loving cripple,” said James, throwing out his hands. “Come for your girlfriend, Leo?”  
“Shut it,” said Leo, passing James without a glance. “Calvin—”  
“Aw,” said Calvin, in a drawl that scraped her marrow, “they’re just playing, Leo. They’re just dumb. You going to rescue me from that?”  
The cross’s shadow fell for an instant across Calvin’s back—  
—and then it was splintering on the clock tower, and Leo smashed the cross home like the scourge of the devil. 

13.  
If you taught for long enough, you would learn something about children.  
Mr. Moore poured the coffee with a shaking hand, and the acid early-morning bite of caffeine filled the teachers’ lounge.  
“I can’t just stand by, Kim. This girl could get hurt.”  
“She’s already getting hurt,” said Mrs. Gordon, filling her mug. “Friend dead. Father beating the tar out of her. If you’ve got any decency—” She reached into her purse. Her rosary tinkled, shedding dust. “You won’t add to that.”  
“Kim.” Mr. Moore rubbed his eyes, coughing through the steam. “She’s being bullied, Kim, and badly. If I could just do something—one phone call, that’s all—is that a waste?”  
 _Brother_ , said Miss Gordon inside her, a modern Miss Gordon with a cynical age in her bones, _you ain’t seen nothing yet._  
“Hurt,” said Mrs. Gordon, “starts in the cradle. For all I know, it goes right on up to the grave.” She rose, clasping her bag, and took her leave.  
The sun warmed the floor varnish, and noontime piano lessons tinkled down the hall, as Kim Gordon walked to class. With every step she said a prayer for three souls.  
The bell rang.

**Author's Note:**

> Did anyone else notice the cross in Midwich's music room, or was it just me?


End file.
